More Traveller Literary Inspiration - Treasure on Thunder Moon

Treasure on Thunder Moon

By Edmond Hamilton

Published in Amazing Stories, 16 #2, April 1942

 

This world is a Red Zone. Literally.

I’ve read and posted about other works by Edmond Hamilton (here and here). Once again I find his work to be a breezy and enjoyable read, if one doesn’t peer too closely at the ‘science’ underneath.

Treasure on Thunder Moon is the most Traveller pulp sci-fi novel I have read to date. Let me count the ways this sounds familiar . . .

The main character is John North (a reference to Northwest Smith?), a 37 year old retired Space Officer. He’s currently out of a job and looking for work. His gang of friends is in the same boat – they’re all too old to work for the Company that monopolizes space travel. They’re living at the scraping-by level in one of Earth’s starport towns hoping to get lucky.

North, Peters, Steenie, Dorak, Hansen, Connor, Whitey. We have our crew of PC veterans. These guys are not in their 60’s and 70’s, but in their 30’s & 40’s.

Starport, check. Looking for Patrons? Check. Long-term subsistence? Check.

The luck arrives in the form of a young woman who happens to be the daughter of an old pal of theirs. She wants their help, to crew a ship. Her destination is Oberon, one of the four moons of Uranus. The plan is collect a treasure that her father discovered but couldn’t recover.

Now we’ve got a Patron, and a Rumor.

On the Pursuit of Noble Titles

More Thoughts on Noble Titles

In an essay titled “Courting Dishonor” in The New Criterion January 2020 issue, author Simon Heffer writes:

“Some people angle desperately for letters to put after their name, or even better, a title before it . . .”

I've spent lots of time thinking about how to get a noble title or into the society of the rich & powerful, at least for my PCs. I've written about it here, here, here, here , and here.

The New Criterion essay made me think about a way of getting a Noble title that I had not considered before. The PC who finds that he has a lot of cash (up into the MCr range) can just BUY a title. Go to the sovereign of some world with a Pr trade code and offer a wad of cash. In exchange you get the right to style one's self Baron of Somewhere or other.

In England, a Baronetcy had no political authority vested in it. It was a title paid for with cash, which means only the wealthy could get it. A Baronet could brag of having a title (like a certain Percy Blakeney, Bart.) which he could pass on. Whatever other benefits accrued were social not material. The king, on the other hand, got a big cash infusion.

Ian Fleming's novel On Her Majesty's Secret Service involved a villainous character trying to get a patent of nobility. The claim was spurious, but the villain thought he could do it through bribery and deception. I don't recall what further villainy he intended to do from there. Though the PCs wouldn't think of using a title as a pretext for crime. Right?

How far would you go to get this estate?

I have written a bit about the idea of social promotion but always from the perspective as SOC promotions coming as the result of real effort – as a reward for success.

(Banned) Weapon Research in my TU

Speaking of research . . . 

Recently I watched again the Star Trek film Insurrection. This will not be a movie review. In the film, there was a space battle scene in which the enemies of the Enterprise used an "isolytic burst" weapon. The Enterprise crew were surprised, as the weapon was banned by some treaty or other, for being unpredictable. I think it was supposed to be a scene to show how the Enterprise crew are creative and resourceful thinkers. Maybe it worked at that, maybe not. Watch the film and judge for yourself.

We never actually see what the weapon is supposed to do. Rather we get told about it by several crewmen, and then the Enterprise defeats it, and the enemies. The weapon might as well have been a 20th century ICBM, or a boring old laser beam.

So I thought, what kinds of crazy weapons could show up in my TU, as unique and probably banned weapons?

Well, there is the "stellar ray" from that post on Edmund Hamilton's "Crashing Suns". That's a crazy-powerful weapon.

Here are some of the unusual and illegal weapons that have been at least researched if not developed by star nations in my TU. The Talaveran Empire has declared a ban on all of them; any vessel found in Imperial Space equipped with such will be impounded and destroyed, or just destroyed if they don't surrender.

"The Imperial Ministry of Defense in conjunction with the Ministries of State and of Science have signed resolutions, later confirmed by the King, banning the experimentation, development production or use of the following devices. Some of these were explored by the Ministry of Defense, but were rejected by the Navy as being “irresponsible, inhumane and contrary to the ways of civilized peoples”."

Surprising Research in the Third Imperium

Readers of my blog will know that I run in my own TU, not the canon Third Imperium. However, that does not mean that I don't pay attention to the canon material. For example, I recently ran across this:

Supplement 8, Library Data (A-M) has an entry on Imperial Research Stations on page 33.

I quote a portion of that article:

“Imperial research may delve into many areas. Some examples include: black hole research, both large scale and mini black hole investigation, instantaneous transmitter development (so far proving impossible) advanced gravity manipulation, generic manipulation, anti-matter containment, weapon research, disintegrator beams, black globe development, deep planetary core soundings, nova prevention and prediction. Psychohistory, mass population behavior prediction, psionics, stable super-heavy elements, deep radar analysis, long range detection systems, robotics, artificial intelligence, stasis and time travel, so-called magic, cryptography, bionics, personal shields, x-ray lasers, and high temperature superconductors.”

Wait. A. Minute.

That list said “magic”.

If that's the Earth, where is she standing?

Let that sink in for a moment.

Magic could exist in Traveller.

Junkyards of Ships

Junkyard in Space

I recently read Edmond Hamilton's short story Sargasso of Space (Thrilling Wonder Stories, 1934) which featured a wreck-pile in space. The setup is that there is an area out past Saturn where none of the planets' gravity fields have influence. In this null space, wrecked or abandoned spaceships have collected like a proto-planet. The protagonists of the story make an unplanned stop in the wreck-pile after a shipboard malfunction sets them adrift.

The short story goes in one specific direction with this, and that's fine. It was an enjoyable short story, but literature is not my purpose today. Like a lot of stories from that era, by today's standards it may seem pretty cliche, but it was the potential of the wreck-pile as a location that got me to thinking.

Programmin' Part Two

Last year when I wrote the post Programmin'

a commenter said this:

Hmm, maybe allow players to make programming throws to optimize the existing code and reduce it's size?

Yes, absolutely!

Tell me again how your MacBook can run a starship. Cuz' I'm not buying it.

The run-of-the-mill Type A Free Trader (or any of the CT 'basic' starships, really) has very limited computing power. Computers are classed by Models; each Model has a rating for CPU and Storage capacity, abstracted into Slots. Each program has a Space rating which is the number of Slots it takes up, whether in CPU or Storage.